F Prime Engages Community with Tutorial and Tech Demos at SmallSat 2025

The F Prime flight software framework was prominently featured at the SmallSat Conference 2025, which took place from August 10-13 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The event highlighted F Prime's growing role in the small satellite community through an educational tutorial and technology demonstrations on the exhibition floor.

The conference began on Sunday, August 10, with a comprehensive, full-day tutorial led by F Prime team members Tim Canham and Michael Starch. They were joined by students from Bronco Space at Cal Poly Pomona, including JPL summer intern Kelly Williams, to guide newcomers through the open-source framework. The full-capacity event was a major success, drawing more than 60 participants from at least 17 universities and 10 companies.

Throughout the week, the F Prime team engaged with conference attendees at a dedicated exhibit within the official NASA booth.

Demonstrating some of F Prime's capabilities, the Bronco Space team showcased their Spacecraft Compartmentalized Autonomous Learning and Edge-computing System (SCALES) at their booth. The SCALES project, a collaboration with JPL that is funded by NASA's University SmallSat Technology Partnerships (USTP) initiative, uses F Prime as its core software architecture. In addition to the platform demonstration, the team presented a technical poster detailing their collaborative work.

A tutorial class team successfully blinking an LED with F Prime

F Prime Cognizant Engineer Michael Starch holding court in the NASA space at SmallSat

Kelly Williams demonstrates the SCALES platform at the Cal Poly Pomona booth at SmallSat